What a Facebook Marketplace monitor actually does
A monitor is a search that keeps running after you close the tab. That is the whole idea, and everything interesting about it is in two questions: how often does it run, and what does it do with what comes back.
This page is about those two questions — including the parts most product pages skip, like what a monitor cannot see and why paying for the fastest interval is often the wrong call.
Free plan scans every 24 hours with no card. Paid cadences are 30 and 5 minutes.
Cadence is the whole product
Every alert tool is selling the same thing at different intervals. Understanding what an interval means in practice stops you overpaying for it.
If your monitor runs every 5 minutes, then in the worst case a listing is 5 minutes old when you hear about it, and on average about five. That is the entire guarantee. It is a good guarantee — it is dramatically better than “whenever Facebook decides to tell you” — but it is bounded, and it is worth understanding before you pay for a faster tier.
The number that actually matters is not the scan interval, it is scan interval plus your response time. A 1-minute scan delivered to a phone you check at lunchtime performs identically to a 30-minute scan. If you are at work all day, the money is better spent on more watchlists than on faster ones.
The exception is categories where listings are genuinely consumed in minutes. If you flip consoles or graphics cards, cadence is the single most valuable thing you can buy, and it is why FlipDar's Pro tier exists at 5 minutes.
Every 24 hours — Free
Every 5 minutes — Pro
Background search every 30 minutes — Enterprise
What a monitor cannot do
Worth stating clearly, because these limits apply to every product in this category regardless of what its marketing says.
It cannot see listings search does not return
It cannot beat a listing that is posted and sold in four minutes
It cannot verify condition
It cannot buy for you
What happens to the results
A monitor that just forwards raw search output is a firehose. The filtering stage is where a monitor becomes usable — and it is where most of the engineering actually is.
- Radius check. Listings outside the distance you set never become alerts, with a tolerance so a listing right on your boundary is not dropped over a rounding error.
- Price rules. Your band applies, and so do rules for the placeholder prices people use to dodge filters — the $1 and $12,345 listings that exist to appear in every search.
- Exclusion words. Your list plus common spam and dropshipper terms. This is the stage that decides whether the feed is worth opening.
- Duplicate suppression. The same item posted twice, or reposted after a week, should not alert you twice. Listings are tracked by their marketplace identity so repeats are recognised across scans.
- Relevance scoring. What survives is ranked, and what you save or hide feeds back in, so the matches drift toward what you actually buy.
Questions people ask
How often should a Marketplace monitor scan?
Match the interval to how long listings survive in your category. Consoles, GPUs and tool lots often sell within the hour, so a 5-minute cadence changes what you win. Furniture and appliances routinely sit for a day, and a 30-minute or 24-hour cadence finds the same items. The right question is not 'how fast can I get' but 'how fast can I respond'.
Does a faster scan mean I see every listing?
No, and it is worth being blunt about this. A monitor sees what Marketplace search returns for your query at the moment it runs. Listings that Facebook does not surface for that query, or that are posted and removed inside one interval, will not appear. Faster scanning narrows that window; it does not eliminate it.
Is this a bot? Will it get my Facebook account banned?
FlipDar does not act on your Facebook account. It does not log in as you, message sellers, post, or click anything on your behalf — you do all of that yourself in Facebook, as normal. It reads publicly visible listing data for the searches you define. That said, Meta's terms and technical measures change, and no third-party tool can promise permanence; FlipDar is independent and not affiliated with Meta.
What happens when a scan fails?
Scans do occasionally fail — a source can be slow or temporarily unavailable. FlipDar surfaces the scan status on the watchlist rather than silently showing you an empty feed, so 'nothing found' and 'nothing ran' are distinguishable. You can also check the public status page.
Can I monitor Craigslist or OfferUp too?
Not with FlipDar. Watchlist scanning is Facebook Marketplace only. Several other products cover multiple marketplaces, and the comparison pages list which ones — if multi-marketplace coverage is your requirement, that is a legitimate reason to pick a different tool.
How many searches can I monitor at once?
Free covers one watchlist; Pro and Enterprise each cover 5. Pricing is per account rather than per watchlist, so the second and third searches do not each add their own subscription. Pro is $8/month and Enterprise is $30/month. Both keep checking watchlists you have paused — every 4 hours on Pro, every 30 minutes on Enterprise.
Try it on one search
Keep reading
- How Marketplace alerts workThe mechanics, and the six configuration mistakes that make people give up.
- Building the search itselfKeywords, exclusions, price band and radius, and how to fix a noisy watchlist.
- Compare monitorsScan intervals and pricing across the main products, cited to each vendor.
- FlipDar pricingWhat each cadence costs, and what changes between the tiers.
FlipDar is an independent product and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or partnered with Meta, Facebook, or eBay. Trademarks belong to their owners. Informational only, not financial advice; resale outcomes vary by category, condition, geography, fees, and timing.